Joy is...

completing Michele's Great Tissue Box Challenge 2010! Michele challenged her readers to create as many little houses as they could from a standard tissue box and embellish them. Quality is as important as quantity. That's my kind of challenge!

My husband helped me design a template to maximize the use of space. He loves that sort of thing. I requested a church complete with steeple, a Federal style house with hip roof, a barn that looks like ours, a town house and a tiny house. I used a bit more cardboard for the larger houses but I was going for quality there. I finished up with lots of tiny houses to maximize quantity! One run in with the X-Acto knife, another with the hot glue gun, and several hours later, I complete 18 houses. I had scraps enough to make up some more house but my templates could no longer be used and I felt defeated by the box!

My first eight houses have a modern Christmas feel. I used sour green, petal pink and white paints. The windows and doors were cut from stickers and carefully stuck in place. I used some sequins from my daughter's crafting stash for wreaths (don't tell!). Then I had some fun with a product called Snow Writer by DecoArt. It gives a three dimensional snow effect. I used it around the bottoms of the houses so it looks like they are sitting in snow. Then I covered the roofs in glue and sprinkled crystal fine glitter all over them for a snow effect!

Here is the modern Christmas village all together.

Here is a little close up of the church, my favorite.

Then I created 10 little gingerbread houses. I painted them brown and once again used the Snow Writer product but this time to mimic icing. I placed little red and white glass beads while it was still wet to look like the candies. Again, I used glitter on the roofs.

I can't decide if they look better displayed on red or white so you get both pictures here! The doors were cut from some Heather Bailey packaging I received with a recent order of felt.
Thank you for the fun challenge Michele!